The beauties in our dreams became a feast
For our starved eyes, embodied in your limbs’
Soft sway, though otherwise, you seemed a beast.
Still, at your feet, our longing sang strange hymns.

Our rapture stammered as at an altar rail
In hopes your gaze would bring embodiment
To what within you still lay blind and frail:
The soul and sense of all we sought and meant.

But you feel not those hours’ joy and pain
When we submerge your image in our dream.
Yet you are life to us. And it is plain
That we are shadows that your beauty’s beam
Must drink in first, so we might breathe.

He who once has countered beauty’s stare
Too soon will find himself consigned to death,
Unfit for any earthly chore or fare.
Yet he will tremble, faced with cease of breath:
He who once has countered beauty’s stare!For him, the pain of love will never die.
A fool alone will feel within his heart
A way on earth to satisfy the cry
Inside he feels when stung by beauty’s dart.
For him, the pain of love will never die.

Ah, he would sicken, dry up like a spring,
Tasting poison in each breath of air,
Breathing death from every flowering thing:
He who once has countered beauty’s stare.
Ah, he would sicken, dry up like a spring!

Definitions of beauty can be reductive. Still, we may know when we have gazed on it—or when its stare has transfixed us—for it can take hold of our total being, soul and sense alike.

When it does, we agree that beauty is, as Pietro Bembo in Castiglione’s Il Courtier affirms, “a holy thing”: one that stems from the eternal creator, or God. As such, it ideally fills us with awe and reverence. To be sure, our regard for it may be insufficient, as seems the case with Tennyson’s Lancelot, who, when faced with the fairy Lady of Shalott, is oblivious to the fact that she has perished out of love for him. Indeed, some forms of beauty may prove inaccessible to us.

Some may even prove perilous. The sun, for instance, is beautiful, yet we cannot eye it from too close a range without danger to our mortal lives. Baudelaire and von Platen depict that kind of beauty in their poems here—a beauty that can, as Yeats warned in “A Prayer for My Daughter,” make one’s “eyes distraught.”

In any event, given its power over us, perhaps it is best to approach beauty with humility. (I say this even while having to admit that beauty often catches us unawares, as when I first heard Mahler’s Eighth Symphony or, as one who had never been an admirer of tapestries, came upon some by William Morris on display at the Cincinnati Art Museum one afternoon and was reduced to tears.) Great works of art can surprise us in this way.

Still, one of the most memorable expressions of awe and reverence in the face of beauty that I have ever witnessed came from the lips of my three-year-old daughter (now thirty and with a child of her own). I was seated in the breakfast room one morning when she appeared at the threshold, half-running, half-tripping, her long brown hair flying, her cherubic form clad in naught but my wife’s sheer baby-blue negligee as it danced and shimmered like mist behind her, its bodice revealing her little dove’s breasts.

“It’s so beautiful I just can’t believe it,” she sobbed, her voice hushed and gushing with joyous wonder.

In trying to capture that moment’s beauty, I feel as helpless as she did then.

William Ruleman’s recent books include the poetry collection From Rage to Hope (White Violet Books, 2016), as well as his translations of Hermann Hesse’s early poems (Cedar Springs Books, 2017) and Stefan Zweig’s unfinished novel Clarissa (Ariadne Press, 2017). He is Professor of English at Tennessee Wesleyan University. More at: williamruleman.com.